The Guardian: ‘How an army of internet activists challenged Big Cable and won again’

The Guardian: ‘How an army of internet activists challenged Big Cable and won again’

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APRIL 24, 2015 | BY SAM THIELMAN

reprinted from The Guardian, theguardian.com

Not long ago, it would have been unthinkable for a coalition of discontented citizens to challenge the business decisions of multinational company with a market cap of nearly $150bn and a boss who plays golf with the president. Last week it happened, and the grassroots guys won. Again.

The $45bn Comcast-Time Warner Cable merger, which would have been the biggest deal in cable history, is officially dead as of Friday morning. That outcome is due in no small part to consumers who managed to make their voices heard to regulators above the lobbying dollars of Big Cable who—in the last year alone—spent a combined $32m making sure they were heard in Washington.

Fresh off another victory against the cable companies, internet activists were determined not to let this deal go through without a fight. In February a grassroots coalition pulled off a massive coup when their campaigning convinced the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to introduce tough new net neutrality laws—rules aimed at protecting an open internet that cable companies had opposed.

“The political winds have shifted dramatically over the past 14 months since Comcast announced its acquisition of Time Warner Cable,” wrote analyst Rich Greenfield of BTIG on Monday. “The same grassroots organizations that helped push the White House’s agenda to drive the net neutrality outcome they desired [were] actively advocating against the Comcast Time Warner Cable transaction.”

To get the attention of the industry’s regulator as it looked at Comcast’s proposed deal, activists used many of the same tools to get the public in touch with the government. During the net neutrality fight, “we built a phone call tool that sort of circumvented the FCC switchboard and connected callers with the 30 people who were closest to the FCC decision,” explained Evan Greer, campaign director for internet rights lobbying group Fight for the Future. Instead of a complex phone tree, Greer explained, “people would call up and they’d hear, ‘Hey, this is Jeff from Battle for the Net. I’m going to connect you to the FCC.’”

“The political winds have shifted dramatically over the past 14 months since Comcast announced its acquisition of Time Warner Cable,” wrote analyst Rich Greenfield of BTIG on Monday. “The same grassroots organizations that helped push the White House’s agenda to drive the net neutrality outcome they desired [were] actively advocating against the Comcast Time Warner Cable transaction.”

After the net neutrality ruling passed, the organization set its sights on the Comcast-TWC merger. “The cable guy will be by between noon and 6pm TO TAKE AWAY YOUR INTERNET FREEDOM” blared a graphic on the organization’s website. The group created a similar direct-access tool for adding comments to the FCC page, a page Greer said “looked like it was made in 1999, which it probably was”.

But good tools aren’t any use unless there are people who want to use them, and it’s very common for community-driven campaigns to collapse after the end of a major fight—even if they win. That didn’t happen this time. Hannah Sassaman, policy director for the Media Mobilizing Project in Comcast’s hometown of Philadelphia, said that she had seen a sea change in the level of consumer knowledge about telecom—complaints about Comcast during the company’s recent survey of Philadelphia (which Comcast is petitioning for the right to renew its license to use public land) “showed a huge amount of literacy”, she said.

“Folks realized that communication isn’t something you can leave wholly to the whims of profit motive,” said Sassaman. Of course, Comcast had been providing incentive for people to learn more about them by very publicly living down to its reputation as a mean-spirited Goliath that charged arbitrary fees and mistreated its customers and employees.

Low-wage phone bank workers took to Reddit to tell tales of being paid according to how many customers they bullied out of canceling their accounts. A man who filed a complaint with the FCC over an increase in the “modem rental fee” on his bill managed to get a few dollars back – but the company wouldn’t change the fee. To make matters worse, reports flooded in near the end of the year of customers having their account names changed to insults—customers received (exorbitant) bills addressed to “dummy”, “Asshole Brown”, “Whore Julia Swano”, and in the case of one 63-year-old Chicago woman, “SuperBitch Bauer”.

“It’s been a tough year for Comcast overall,” said Greer. “They’ve been hounded in the court of public opinion.” Comedy writers were getting in on the act, too: “Nation’s Cable Companies Announce They’re Just Going to Take $100 From Everyone,” announced a headline in The Onion last June.

And pressure on the FCC, another product of the net neutrality fight—and the work of entertainers, notably John Oliver—hadn’t let up, either. In Comcast’s last merger, with NBCUniversal, the regulator raised the hackles of its critics after one of its commissioners, Meredith Attwell Baker, took a job lobbying her former colleagues on Comcast’s behalf a scant four months after the deal went through. When net neutrality came around, “we made the FCC famous,” Greer said. “They’re under more scrutiny than they’ve ever been in history, and it seems since we’ve done that that they’ve been acting differently than they had.”

There’s likely to be more consolidation to come in the cable market—billionaire John Malone’s cable company Charter wants to buy Bright House and may place other bids, as well perhaps even for Time Warner. But Tim Karr, of internet rights group Free Press, says organizations like his remain vigilant. “Our tendency in general is to encourage these companies to spend their time and money competing against one another instead of merging and carving out territory where they don’t compete at all.”

Indeed, as telecom cases become causes celebres, future transactions can count on scrutiny from even higher up the food chain—outgoing attorney general Eric Holder is said to have personally approved an antitrust suit to block the Comcast merger, should the FCC have moved toward allowing it. Even the president—a golfing partner of Comcast CEO Brian Roberts—has adopted a tough line. “For almost a century, our law has recognized that companies who connect you to the world have special obligations not to exploit the monopoly they enjoy over access into and out of your home or business,” he said at the height of the net neutrality debate.

FCC chairman Tom Wheeler’s statement on the failed merger echoed that sentiment. “Comcast and Time Warner Cable’s decision to end Comcast’s proposed acquisition of Time Warner Cable is in the best interests of consumers,” he wrote. “The proposed transaction would have created a company with the most broadband and video subscribers in the nation alongside the ownership of significant programming interests.”

In a remarkable turnaround Wheeler, a former cable lobbyist, has become the champion of an army of internet activists who appear ready to rise up whenever they think the internet is under threat. Big Cable has been bested by the internet it delivers.

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